Over twelve days in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi — ten days before Hurricane Katrina, the day of the storm, and the day after — fourteen-year-old Esch Batiste narrates her motherless family's struggle to endure. Esch has just realized she is pregnant by her brother's friend Manny, who will not claim her. Her brother Skeetah pours everything into his pit bull China and her dying litter of puppies; Randall pins his hopes on basketball; Junior, whose birth killed their mother, is still small; and their father, a hard-drinking, largely absent man, prepares the family's meager stores as best he can. Ward, who lived through Katrina in Mississippi, draws on Faulkner and on the myth of Medea, which Esch is reading, to give this poor, loving family classical scale. Her second novel, it won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction.
Author: Jesmyn Ward · Original publisher: Bloomsbury USA (New York), 2011
